How I Helped Elmore Leonard Research Get Shorty

Gregg Sutter Introduces an Excerpt from Leonard's Hollywood Novel

After finishing Killshot in 1989, Elmore Leonard felt ready to set about writing his Hollywood novel. He was well equipped, having worked in Hollywood, on and off, for 20 years. Screenwriting had long been Elmore’s means to support novel writing. He would either write a screenplay first, as with Mr. Majestyk (filmed in 1974) and Forty Lashes Less One (which was not made), or the novel first and then the screenplay, as with City Primeval, Stick, and LaBrava, of which only one—Burt Reynolds’ adaptation of Stick, profoundly disappointing to Elmore—was produced.

Get Shorty was not to be told from the vantage point of a film industry insider. Instead, Elmore would bring in an outsider—Chili Palmer—to shake up Tinsel Town. He had used real people as character models in the past—the cops in City Primeval or the judge in Maximum Bob—but none of these to the extent he would use Chili Palmer.

Elmore first met Ernesto “Chili” Palmer (1937-2008) in the late 1970s. Chili was then working, in Miami, for the private detective agency of William C. “Bill” Marshall (1928-1989). Elmore had turned to Marshall, a classmate from the University of Detroit, for research help on South Florida when he was writing Gold Coast (1980). Chili photographed locations like the Cardozo Hotel in LaBrava, and he accompanied Elmore and his second wife Joan on a research trip to Puerto Rico for Glitz (1985).

Elmore loved Chili’s name, the first time he heard it, and always wanted to use it for a character. For this new book, Elmore finally got the chance. He asked Chili, who said ok, and Elmore paid him for the privilege. A big bonus would be attached to that name: Chili’s life story, of which Elmore had thus far only gotten the broad strokes. Elmore sent me to Florida to interview Chili at Bill Marshall’s home in North Miami in August 1988. My three-and-a-half-hour sit-down with Chili and Bill would yield the entire backstory for the fictional Chili in Get Shorty.

Chili detailed his background:

I came from Coney Island, Brooklyn. I’m half Puerto Rican, half Spanish. I grew up with the Italians. Mafia breeding ground, basically. Out of a hundred guys I grew up with, seventy are probably dead already. . . . Coming up, I wasn’t a good kid. It was a rough neighborhood. In my teens, I was a burglar. Later on, I did stickups and armed robberies. Done some work for the local boss in the neighborhood. I used to take Italian numbers and the football pool. I worked for the bookies. That was my upbringing. . .

When Joe Columbo took over the Brooklyn crew after Joe Profaci died, he borrowed a million dollars from Carlo Gambino. He took that million and gave $100,000 to ten different guys including me, and two partners, to put out on the street in Miami. That’s how I got into shylocking.

Chili explained how every discussion with a guy seeking a loan begins:

Whenever a guy comes to you for shylock money, usually the first thing you tell him up front before you give him a nickel, is do me a favor, don’t take this fucking money, ok? I’m advising you, don’t take this fucking money, because if you take it, you’re going to have to fucking pay it back. I ain’t no bank, I don’t send no fucking credit letters. If you can’t pay me every week you’re going to feel sorry about it. So if you don’t think you can pay, don’t take the fucking money.

And this is how Elmore wrote Chili’s shylock mission statement in Get Shorty:

A guy comes to see you, it doesn’t matter how much he wants or why he needs it, you say to him up front before you give him a dime, “You sure you want to take this money? You’re not gonna put up your house or sign any papers. What you’re gonna give me is your word you’ll pay it back so much a week at interest.” You tell him, “If you don’t think you can pay at least the vig every week when it’s due, please don’t take the fuckin money, it wouldn’t be worth it to you.” If the guy hesitates at all, “Well, I’m pretty sure I can—” says anything like that, I tell him, “No, I’m advising you now, don’t take the fuckin money.”

In Get Shorty, Chili goes to Las Vegas to find Leo Devoe, who has scammed an airline for insurance money by faking his death. While in Las Vegas, Chili agrees to do a favor for a casino collection manager and look up Harry Zimm, a schlock producer in Hollywood who is holding gambling “markers” for $150,000. Chili’s encounter with Harry whets his appetite for moviemaking, setting Get Shorty in motion. Immediately after the Florida trip, I flew to Las Vegas. Elmore had arranged for me to meet Golden Nugget casino manager White Mitchell, for whom Bill and Chili (the real one) had made Zimm and the tricky business of collecting casino debts. Elmore found this information very useful in shaping the story.

Inevitably, I ended up in Hollywood. There wasn’t much I could tell Elmore about the movie business, so I focused on filling out story elements. I challenged myself to come up with cool stuff. I never knew if one of my discoveries would work, but as long as I saw humor or high contrast, maybe Elmore would too. An example is the attraction Miami Vice Action Spectacular at the Universal Studios theme park. Elmore ended up using it in a scene where Bear, former stuntman and muscle for the bad guys, talks to Yayo, a mean little Colombian drug mule:

You know, some shacks at the edge of the water, we’re in the grandstand watching. The voice-over says, ‘They have ruffled some feathers in flamingo land and the band of smugglers have a dynamite surprise waiting for them.” It’s all low-grade special effects, but the tourists eat it up.

The real impetus for Get Shorty was Elmore’s playful payback for all the disillusionments he had undergone in Hollywood, from Burt Reynolds’s misguided direction of Stick to Dustin Hoffman’s prima donna moves on the abortive film version of LaBrava. In the latter case Elmore got a great takeaway by using Hoffman as the model for the actor Michael Weir, the “Shorty” of the title.

Get Shorty was filmed in 1995, a box office success that finally got Elmore’s sound and tone right on the screen. Screenwriter Scott Frank and director Barry Sonnenfeld followed Elmore’s edict not to cut away to a reaction shot when a character said something funny because his characters didn’t know they were being funny. Only the audience knew.

The real Chili Palmer makes a cameo appearance in the opening of Get Shorty as one of mobster Ray Bones’s henchmen.

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From Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty

When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio’s on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off. One his wife had given him for Christmas a year ago, before they moved down here.

Chili and Tommy were both from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, old buddies now in business together. Tommy Carlo was connected to a Brooklyn crew through his uncle, a guy named Momo, Tommy keeping his books and picking up betting slips till Momo sent him to Miami, with a hundred thousand to put on the street as loan money. Chili was connected through some people on his mother’s side, the Manzara brothers. He worked usually for Manzara Moving & Storage in Bensonhurst, finding high-volume customers for items such as cigarettes, TVs, VCRs, stepladders, dresses, frozen orange juice. . . . But he could never be a made guy himself because of tainted blood, some Sunset Park Puerto Rican on his father’s side, even though he was raised Italian. Chili didn’t care to be made anyway, get into all that bullshit having to do with respect. It was bad enough having to treat these guys like they were your heroes, smile when they made some stupid remark they thought was funny. Though it was pretty nice, go in a restaurant on 86th or Cropsey Avenue the way they knew his name, still a young guy then, and would bust their ass to wait on him. His wife Debbie ate it up, until they were married a few years and she got pregnant. Then it was a different story. Debbie said with a child coming into their lives he had to get a regular job, quit associating with “those people” and bitched at him till he said okay, all right, Jesus, and lined up the deal with Tommy Carlo in Miami. He told Debbie he’d be selling restaurant supplies to the big hotels like the Fontainebleau and she believed him—till they were down here less than a year and he had his jacket ripped off.

This time at Vesuvio’s, they finished eating, Tommy said he’d see him at the barbershop—where they had a phone in back—turned up the collar of his Palm Beach sport coat for whatever good it would do him and took off. Chili went in the checkroom to get his jacket and all that was in there were a couple of raincoats and a leather flight jacket must’ve been from World War Two. When Chili got the manager, an older Italian guy in a black suit, the manager looked around the practically empty checkroom and asked Chili, “You don’t find it? Is not one of these?”

Chili said, “You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suitcoat? You don’t, you owe me three seventy-nine.” The manager told him to look at the sign there on the wall, we cannot be responsible for lost articles. Chili said to him, “I bet you can if you try. I didn’t come down to sunny Florida to freeze my ass. You follow me? You get the coat back or you give me the three seventy-nine my wife paid for it at Alexander’s.”

So then the manager got a waiter over and they talked to each other in Italian for a while, the waiter nervous or he was anxious to get back to folding napkins. Chili caught some of what they were saying and a name that came up a few times, Ray Barboni. He knew the name, a guy they called Bones he’d seen hanging out at the Cardozo Hotel on the beach. Ray Bones worked for a guy named Jimmy Capotorto who’d recently taken over a local operation from a deceased guy named Ed Grossi—but that was another story. The manager said to the waiter, “Explain to him Mr. Barboni borrow the coat.”

The waiter, trying to act like an innocent bystander, said, “Somebody take his coat, you know, leave this old one. So Mr. Barboni put on this other coat that fit him pretty good. He say he gonna borrow it.”

Chili said, “Wait a minute,” and had the waiter, who didn’t seem to think it was unusual for some asshole to take a jacket that didn’t belong to him, explain it again.

“He didn’t take it,” the waiter said, “he borrow it. See, we get his coat for him and he return the one he borrow. Or I think maybe if it’s your coat,” the waiter said, “he give it to you. He was wearing it, you know, to go home. He wasn’t gonna keep it.”

“My car keys are in the pocket,” Chili said.

They both looked at him now, the manager and the waiter, like they didn’t understand English.

“What I’m saying,” Chili said, “how’m I suppose to go get my coat if I don’t have the keys to my car?”

The manager said they’d call him a taxi.

“Lemme get it straight,” Chili said. “You aren’t responsible for any lost articles like an expensive coat of mine, but you’re gonna find Ray Bones’ coat or get him a new one. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Basically, he saw they weren’t telling him shit, other than Ray Bones was a good customer who came in two three times a week and worked for Jimmy Cap. They didn’t know where he lived and his phone number wasn’t in the book. So Chili called Tommy Carlo at the barbershop, told him the situation, asked him a few times if he believed it and if he’d come by, pick him up.

“I want to get my coat. Also pull this guy’s head out of his ass and nail him one.”

Tommy said, “Tomorrow, I see on the TV weather, it’s gonna be nice and warm. You won’t need the coat.”

Chili said, “Debbie gave me it for Christmas, for Christ sake. I go home, she’s gonna want to know where it’s at.”

“So tell her you lost it.”

“She’s still in bed since the miscarriage. You can’t talk to her. I mean in a way that makes any fuckin sense if you have to explain something.”

Tommy said, “Hey, Chil? Then don’t fuckin tell her.”

Chili said, “The guy takes my coat, I can’t ask for it back?”

Tommy Carlo picked him up at the restaurant and they stopped by Chili’s apartment on Meridian where they were living at the time so he could run in and get something. He tried to be quiet about it, grab a pair of gloves out of the front closet and leave, but Debbie heard him.

She said from the bedroom, “Ernie, is that you?” She never called him Chili. She called him honey in her invalid voice if she wanted something. “Honey? Would you get my pills for me from the sink in the kitchen and a glass of water, please, while you’re up?” Pause. “Or, no—honey? Gimme a glass of milk instead and some of those cookies, the ones you got at Winn-Dixie, you know the chocolate chip ones?” Dragging it out in this tired voice she used since the miscarriage, three months ago. Taking forever now to ask him what time it was, the alarm clock sitting on the bed table a foot away if she turned her head. They had known each other since high school, when he’d played basketball and she was a baton twirler with a nice ass. Chili told her it was three-thirty and he was running late for an appointment; bye. He heard her say, “Honey? Would you . . .” but he was out of there.

In the car driving the few blocks over to the Victor Hotel on Ocean Drive, Tommy Carlo said, “Get your coat, but don’t piss the guy off, okay? It could get complicated and we’d have to call Momo to straighten it out. Okay? Then Momo gets pissed for wasting his time and we don’t need it. Right?”

Chili was thinking that if he was always bringing Debbie her pills, how did they get back to the kitchen after? But he heard Tommy and said to him, “Don’t worry about it. I won’t say any more than I have to, if that.”

He put on his black leather gloves going up the stairs to the third floor, knocked on the door three times, waited, pulling the right-hand glove on tight, and when Ray Bones opened the door Chili nailed him. One punch, not seeing any need to throw the left. He got his coat from a chair in the sitting room, looked at Ray Bones bent over holding his nose and mouth, blood all over his hands, his shirt, and walked out. Didn’t say one word to him.